Setting
The World
Who is fighting whom on the Brakion Continent, and where.
The Brakion Continent has been at war long enough that most people alive have never known it otherwise. The Empire wants the whole of it, and has spent years proving it will spend anything to get there. What stands against it is not one army but an agreement between people who would not otherwise be in a room together — and holding that agreement together turns out to be most of the job.
The Empire
The aggressor, and the reason there is a front line at all. The Empire fights a conventional war where it has to and an unconventional one wherever it can — its messengers move through territory that is supposed to be closed, and its agents have spent long enough inside allied cities to have friends in their senates.
It also fields things that are not soldiers. Part of the campaign against it is simply working out how it has kept control of the beasts it sends, because nobody on the other side has a satisfying answer to that yet.
The alliance, and Etherain
The Rochel Republic is the ally worth having, and Ignis leads it. Getting the Republic to commit is an errand the player is actually sent on — you carry the proposal to Etherain yourself, which tells you something about how thin the diplomatic corps has become.
Etherain does not decide things the way a kingdom does. Power sits with its senate, so an alliance is a vote, and a vote can be worked on from the inside. It has been: senators have been caught building quiet ties to the Empire, and not all of them were caught in time.
Where the fighting is
The Snowy Plains offensive is the war in its plainest form — a push that everything else is measured against, and the thing most likely to collapse if the wrong messenger gets through.
Away from the front the continent is stranger. Helron's Castle goes down as far as it goes up, and the things in its lower levels are not the Empire's doing. The Valley of the Dragonkin, the Aiort Graveyard and the Forest of Beasts are all older than this war and indifferent to it, and the Trials of Fire and Wind ask something of you that an army cannot help with.
Who you fight it as
Nine classes, each splitting into two specialisations that decide whether you deal the damage, hold the line, curse what is in front of you or keep everyone else standing.
See the classes